Don Quixote and last class

"'Listen, my dear brother,' the priest said again, ' there never was a Felixmarte of Hyrcania in this world, or a Don Cirongilio of Thrace, or any other knights like them that the books of chivalry tell about, because it is all fiction made up by idle minds, composed to create the effect you mentioned, to while away the time, just as your harvesters amuse themselves by reading them. Really, I swear to you, there never were knights like these in the world, and their great deeds, and all that other nonsense, never happened'

'Throw that bone to another dog!' responded the innkeeper."

Don Quixote pg. 270

Interestingly enough, during class on 9/29/08 we somehow ended up in the realm of reality verses fiction or the High Mimetic vs. Low thanks to our little discussion of Batman.  Now I'm more of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles person myself but the discussion was quite coincidental for me because only the night before I stumbled onto the above passage while reading.  It raised the question of reality vs. fantasy and the role played by the two states of mind in the life of literature and the life of "real."  I pondered this for a bit with no concrete success more just a internal struggle with tangent thoughts of true "reality."  Enter Northrop Frye into my internal dialogue.  The more I read Frye's theories of Archetypes the more literature seems to make sense.  If all literature is displaced myth or ritual then it seems that literature acts as the replacement for ceremonies our species developed over the course of evolution.  In the broad spectrum of time, humans evolved at an incredibly rapid pace especially from the cave dwelling era to now.  Like all species, humans have instincts and it seems hard to believe that instincts developed over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution completely disappeared over the last 15,000 years. The thought of humans dancing around fires chanting strange incantations towards the moon seems a bit outlandish during this day and age so maybe rather than continuing such ancient traditions, we developed a defence mechanism to satisfy these primal urges without actually performing them and therefore maintaining the instincts built into our DNA over the generations before recorded history.  It seems then that fiction may not be so fictitious after all.  Rather its a "real" extension of instincts from ancient history.  That being said, it becomes a bit harder to differentiate reality from fiction and completely defends both Don Quixote and the innkeeper's belief in the reality of the chivalric fiction.  Although I will note that Don Quixote takes the grey area between the two and crosses into another plane of lunacy altogether by acting out the fictions.  The innkeeper actually seems quite intelligent in challenging the priest to the true real nature of the books on Chivalry.  Because after all as the innkeeper points out a bit before the above quote how his harvesters sit around and "[. . .] listen to him read with so much pleasure that it save [them] a thousand grey hairs [. . .]"  They save the grey hairs not by listening to fiction but by actually acting upon a real instinct.  So where is the line between the two.  'Spose its hard to say really... or is it fictionally.

Who is Ramon Fernandez

Who is Ramon Fernandez? Some random guy? A friend of Wallace Stevens.
Actually he is the Phillipine Basketball Association's all-time leading scorer and is widely considered the greatest PBA player of all time. Like "His Airness" Michael Jordan, fans affectionately referred to Fernandez as "Don Ramon" or "El Presidente."



"El Presidente"


Well actually, Ramon Fernandez was a French literary critic during the early to mid 20th century. He was a popular critic during his time but has become all but unknown since. Wallace Stevens was quoted as saying "Ramon Fernandez was not intended to be anyone at all. I chose two everyday Spanish names. I knew of Ramon Fernandez, the critic, and had read some of his criticisms but did not have him in mind."

check more of this out at
"The history of Modern Criticism"
By Rene Wellek

Who is the real Ramon Fernandez? Hard to say but if you see Wallace Stevens you should ask him because I'd love to know.

The singer and the lamp

The basic principle discussed by M. H. Abrams in his book "The Mirror and the Lamp" explains the shift in literary theories from mirror literature that reflects the real world and lamp literature that spills the soul from its creator.

The singing girl in "the Idea of Order at Key West" exemplifies the Abrams lamp theory. While the lamp generally applies to the actual artist of the work (i.e. Wallace Stevens) I believe a good argument can be made that the true artist of the poem is the girl whom both the direct audience (Ramon Fernandez and the narrator) and the reader fall captivated by the song she sings. The singers ability to evoke indescribable emotion from her audience through song coincides with the idea that the artist spills fourth his or her soul to shed meaning on the world. "The heaving speech of air, a summer sound/ Repeated in a summer without end/ And sound alone. But it was more than that,/ More even than her voice, and ours, among/ The meaningless plungings of water and the wind." This quote illustrates how the song evokes a feeling of nostalgia so indescribable it must be compared with the songs ability to belittle the mighty sea. "She was the maker" that re-ordered the world both reader and the narrator lived in due to the sheer power of her song. The powerful ability to shape the audience's world perfectly exemplifies Romantics critics focus on the artist and meaning.

Allow me to introduce Stanley Fish

Here he is ladies and gentalmen.  Stanley Fish.  Those piercing eyes, those rugged good looks, that black turtleneck.  He certainly has the look of an intellectual.

More Frye and a shameless plug

"Thus we speak of the rhythm of music and the pattern of painting; but later, to show off our sophistication, we may begin to speak of the rhythm of painting and the pattern of music."

Northrop Frye

Archetypes of Literature

And now a shameless plug of one of my favorite bands, Sound Tribe Sector 9.  I lose myself in the rhythm and patterns every time and my guess is you will too.  Great tunes for skiing powder.  What's the connection to Frye and Literary criticism?  I'll let everyone decide for themselves.

The file is the song Hidden Hands, Hidden Fist off the "Peaceblaster" CD.  It just plays over a black background.

 

Seamless Frye and Cervantes

"In fiction, we discovered two main tendencies, a 'comic' tendency to integrate the hero with his society, and a 'tragic' tendency to isolate him."

-Northrop Frye

Anatomy of Criticism

pg. 54

Frye always delights when he graces his dense writing with little tidbits such as the quote from above, compact, easy to digest and above all quite insightful into his world of criticism.  Using the above quote I can begin the process of categorizing literature as I read.  Rather than jumping straight into the realms of mimetic, myth, and romance, I can begin with the tragic and the comic. From there, the super-highway of literature narrows down to a two lane state highway which although a little slower, is much more scenic.  Once I separate between the comic and the tragic the specific modes become much more apparent.

  For example, after about 225 pages of Don Quixote,  I found a nice little mix of comic modes because the Don attempts to integrate his ideal chivalric lifestyle into an unreceptive world.  The Don himself lives in the Comic high mimetic and romantic because of his crazy pipe dreams and hallucinations of his chivalric quest.  After reading "light literature" of the High mimetic and Romantic mode, Don Quixote believes the real world exists in these same modes-- enter the low mimetic mode.  The true world in which Don Quixote lives more closely resembles the low mimetic mode where chivalric knights do not exist.  A comic high mimetic character mixed with a comic low mimetic setting results in comic irony and the creation of the pharmakos in Sancho Panza who inevitably receives the brunt of the Don's imagined quests.  The blend of the comic modes creates great depth in the novel and makes for a wildly entertaining read.

Class 9/15/08

While I can't necessarily catagorize all aspects of class as interesting (My appology for the slight offence). Two words defined by Dr. Sexon stood out as critical terms in relation to lit crit and especially our study of Northrop Frye.

Mimesis- meaning mimiced
Poiesis- meaning created

These definitions led me to question wether Frye believed in Poesis because as he contends "we may think of our romantic, high mimetic and low mimetic modes as series of displaced myths, mythoi or plot-formulas progressivly moving over towards the opposite pole of verisimilitude, and then, with irony, begining to move back" (pg. 52, Anatomy of Criticism) If all literature is displaced myth how can any new meaning in literature be created. Has the human race already created all meaning possible in literature? This sits a bit uneasy however I don't believe Frye to be so regimented in his doctrine. While I agree that most if not all literature stems from ancient ritual or myth or instinct as Frye believes, new created meaning can be interpreted due to each reader's ability to interpret texts personally. Poiesis then is not a dead term. For some reason while reading Frye I got this impression initally however my cloudy brain cleared itself with a bit of windy blogging. After all "how can I know what I think until I see what I say" (E.M. Forster)

The literary boys of summer

 “There is certainly no evidence that baseball has descended from a ritual of human sacrifice, but the umpire is quite as much of a pharmakos as if it had: he is an abandoned scoundrel, a greater robber than Barabbas; he has the evil eye; the supporters of the losing team scream for his death. At play, mob emotions are boiled in an open pot, so to speak; in the lynching mob they are in a sealed furnace of what Blake would call moral virtue.”

(pg. 46, Anatomy of Criticism)

Between reading the “Archetypes of Literature” and Anatomy of Criticism, it seems safe to presume Northrop Frye’s main contention states that all literature and as a result all modern human activities stem from a primeval instincts played out through ritual and the Myths created by ritual. As I read Frye and his contentions, I tend to agree simply based on the massive amount of obscure and not so obscure literary references he uses to back his arguments. While I am sure “the clearest example of high mimetic comedy is the Old Comedy of Aristophanes;” arguments such as these tend to drowned the average reader of literary criticism in terminology and more importantly an unfamiliar reference. I can look up “high mimetic” and “Old Comedy” however I fail to truly understand Frye’s meaning until I read and comprehend Aristophanes. When reading Frye, countless examples like the above create a fissure between simply reading words and true understanding of said words. Thankfully, Frye occasionally inserts a gem amongst all the mush that allows a layperson such as myself to feel a bit more like a well read literary scholar. Enter the quote from above taken from page 46 of Anatomy of Criticism. I come from an athletic background and while I am capable of understanding dense literary metaphor, the occasional sports reference eases the transition a bit. This quote perfectly exemplifies Frye’s contention concerning ritual and myth in literature. No better modern pharmakos or scapegoat emerges from modern culture than an Umpire. This most hated species of Zebra comes under constant scrutiny from players and armchair quarterbacks alike. While I previously believed very little correlation between Baseball and Ancient religious beliefs, the umpire as a scapegoat metaphor becomes perfectly logical. Although baseball may not exactly be literature, it helps one such as myself better understand theory of literature according to Frye. Wait…Hold on a minute…Didn’t one of Frye’s contentions state that “the structures in words are partly rhetorical, and hence literary” There are plenty of words in and around baseball, perhaps it’s a bit more literary than first expected.  I'll bet thats what Lou Piniella thinks.

Test

Just a test more to come soon